


you are all the weapons you need, i am everything else that you didn't

by kwritten



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: Adulthood, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/F, F/M, Lesbian Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2015-05-26
Packaged: 2018-04-01 08:23:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4012576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wendy Darling and Susan Pevensie grow up, maybe. </p><p>She can feel her bones and they are weak and small and too young. Her body is not her own, it is always too soft, too fragile, too big, too small. She will never grow into herself because she's grown before and can't get it back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are all the weapons you need, i am everything else that you didn't

"I can feel my bones growing," she whispers, her voice high-pitched and breathy. "They creak and shatter like glaciers. I can feel them inside me all the time, stretching and breaking."

"That's scientifically impossible. You've finished growing long ago," her voice is deep, annoyed, tired maybe. Maybe she is a world away with her book and her papers. Maybe she is sitting on a cold beach, the wind ruffling through her hair distorting her voice. Maybe she is dancing with the other woman lithe and thin beneath her fingertips.

"Can you feel yours? Can you feel them moving inside of you? Growing so fast you can't catch up, can't catch your breath?" she is always a child, never ready for the world, always a lost little lamb with a knife between her teeth and fire in her eyes. She's killed pirates with just a flick of her wrist and no remorse, but try telling that to anyone who knows her, who sees the blue silk bow in her short, curling hair. She's gray at the temples, she has the body of a thirteen year old boy - no flesh where a woman should have flesh, too many limbs that she controls with a reckless abandon bordering on self-harm, muscles that cling to bone like a virus - she is too young and too old and uncontrollable and unquenchable. 

She is Susan's whole world and only the smallest part of her desire. 

"I wish," she whispers in response and presses a kiss to that grey temple carefully, thoughtfully. She can feel her bones and they are weak and small and too young. Her body is not her own, it is always too soft, too fragile, too big, too small. She will never grow into herself because she's grown before and can't get it back. 

 

 

"I fell in love once, when I was too young to know what love is, when I was too young not to know what love is."

They are drunk on wine. Their dates are drunk on wine and two women glance appraisingly across the table at each other. One has a date too young and one has a date far too old and yet they are so desperately the same they could be made from the same blood. 

"I have loved in four lifetimes and each was a boy in his own way."

Afterwards, all sinew and bone the girl with a bow in her hair and a lock of gray hair too old for her childish face will ask, "Have you ever loved a woman?"

"No. But I think in this life, I will choose to love a girl."

Girls can break your heart. Especially ones that like to get lost - flying out of windows with boys that cannot love them back and coming home with another scar and another reason to cry into her pillow at night.

"You said a boy broke your heart because he refused to grow up, why would you do the same to me?"

Wendy stands with her feet wide in the pants she stole from a box in the attic marked Edmund that she promised never to open and doesn't cry because her heart is harder than you could ever imagine, "Why do you keep trying to grow up so fast, when you know I can't follow you?"

Susan attends the opera alone, in their private box because Wendy likes to dance along and that disturbs other people so her brothers bought her a box. She wears an elegant gown and elbow-length gloves and her hair and lipstick are perfect. She knows she looks like a queen, alone in her box, even if she isn't one anymore. 

On the third night, Michael joins her in the box and he's old enough to be desirable and so she fucks him on the floor during the second act, her hand pressed firmly over his mouth so that he doesn't shout out and give it all away. She brings him to tears and he holds her shaking body close to his. 

"I was betrothed to a man like you once, when I was older."

"Don't you mean when you were younger?"

She leaves a lipstick stain on his pristine white collar and a bite mark below his ear because she's feeling cruel. 

She is ancient. She has lived a thousand lives.

 

 

"You're back."

It is both a question and a plea. She's never back for long. She brings heartache with each departure out a window. No walls could ever hold her. 

Susan is never envious. Never feels a hard coldness seep into her heart when she enters an empty house. She never thinks of Caspian - his crooked smile and his honest heart - and wonder if he would dare pull her out of a window if he could. He wouldn't. He's too noble. 

She is a princess in a tower guarded by a cruel world that doesn't have a space for her and no prince is coming to rescue her and the dragon she chose for a companion is too wild to pin down, chasing shadows night after night. 

"How long was I gone?"

"You really want to know." Susan makes statements out of the questions she refuses to answer.

Her kiss is wild and tastes like the ocean and a night sky and what Susan imagines stars must taste like. She's all hers for the moment and so Susan takes what she can. 

She's all hers for the moment and so Wendy takes what she's given. That's all she's ever had, the scraps that ancient things dangle in front of her like a weapon; they hurt going down, like eating glass. 

 

There's a shadow in the living room and it has a lipstick stain on one shoulder. Susan can't tell if it's the left or the right because she's not as well-versed in shadows as Wendy is. There's someone's shadow in the living room but no someone and that doesn't alarm Susan in the least because Wendy has been gone six months and she's already resigned herself to learning of a death through the lips of a boy she hates with eyes as old as her own. There's a shadow in the living room. 

"Do you belong to someone?"

It hands her a note that just has an 'X' on it and she remembers that Peter never learned his letters. He signs his name with an X because he finds it romantic. He has strange ideas. 

She serves the shadow ham and mashed potatoes lit by candlelight. It digs in with relish, matching her bite for bite. It does it's own dishes, washing them in time with her. It follows her to bed even though the hallway is fully lit and it should disappear. This is how she knows it isn't her own. 

She dreams of a lion eating her still-beating heart while her siblings watch with blank stares. She dreams of every lover she's ever whispered to in the dark, lined up on a stage under a spotlight. 

Wendy returns on a sunny Saturday afternoon through the front door. 

"Susan, darling, I'm home!"

She says it as though Susan Darling was a name and not an endearment and maybe that's what it is. She hasn't felt like a Pevensie in a very long time. There is a suggestion deep in her heart that maybe she never really was one anyway. Maybe that was the problem.

The shadow stands up and embraces Wendy and Susan feels her thin arms on her waist. 

"There's a Shadow here, from Peter I guess."

 

When she walks out the front door, she takes with her the gift that Peter gave her. 

"That's my Shadow, silly. I took yours for company. Mine came back on it's own."

But it came with a note and that's when she knows the truth and walks across the room and out the door for the last time. 

No one notices that her shadow is not her own. She takes it with her to bed. It watches her fuck men of indeterminate ages. There is nothing ever desperate to the act. It never judges her. 

 

No one notices that she has two shadows - one with a bow in its hair and the other something much, much wilder. It also came with a note, signed with an X.

Her own Shadow never came back. 

She thinks it is living a wildly adventurous life on a pirate ship. 

She grows up, she marries, she has children. Maybe. In one version she does. She makes the world change with the flick of her pen. She is powerful or she is not. 

She grows old and she dies. 

But her shadows do not. They sit on her gravestone and wait for someone to tell them what to do next. Theirs is the story of a tragedy but they do not have the words for it. They could create chaos but instead they mourn. And a hundred thousand dreams away their bodies can't even know, will never know, the tragedy that they nearly witnessed. 

Of a woman growing, learning, winning, losing, and never looking back.


End file.
